Integrated Physiological, Genetic and Demographic Responses to Long-Term Habitat Change

通过这个研究项目，PI试图了解决定人口命运的生态，生理和遗传健康措施。这项研究将回答为什么有些种群茁壮成长，而其他种群在相似的栖息地中枯萎并最终灭绝的问题。这项研究的另一个目标是利用过去二十年收集的冷冻组织来测试健康和衰退人群的生理健康和遗传状态。最终，这项研究将通过考虑个体的生理和遗传特征，对动物如何在其景观中移动、利用资源以及在野外生存产生更好的预测能力。PI的事业将涉及许多高中生和大学生，以及攻读理学硕士或博士学位的研究生。在20世纪末和21世纪初，人类活动对环境景观造成的巨大变化对生物及其种群构成了紧迫的挑战。潜在的生物体对不适宜和瓦解的栖息地的反应是迁移、死亡、生态适应或进化适应。预测这些人口的结果需要长期的研究，在物种，人口，生理，生态和遗传变异性进行了监测之前，以及在一段时间的栖息地变化。PI将耦合长期的空间和时间数据，跨越1976年到现在，在生理过程和生活史性状的变化与人口健康的遗传标记，以开发一个框架，整合生理学，遗传学和人口统计学预测面临栖息地退化的人口的反应。此外，他们将耦合措施的个人状态变量（生理可塑性，基因型和健身措施），以连接个人水平的国家和个人之间的异质性人口水平的人口统计。他们将通过挖掘或长期收集居住在内华达州山脉东北部的束带蛇的复制种群的组织和DNA来实现测量长期健康指数的目标。为了实现综合目标，将开发和利用具有结构方程建模和其他建模方法的数学模型。这将导致生理和遗传变异，生物体生活史变异和环境变异之间的关系的完全链接模型。

With this research project, the PI seeks to understand the ecological, physiological, and genetic health measures that determine a population's fate. This research will result in an answer to the question why some populations thrive and grow, whereas others, in similar habitats, wither and ultimately go extinct. Another goal of this research is to utilize collections of frozen tissue collected over the past two decades to test for physiological health and genetic state of the individuals that comprise both healthy and declining populations. Ultimately, this research will result in a better predictive power about how animals move across their landscapes, utilize resources, and persist in the wild by taking into consideration the physiological and genetic signatures of individuals. The PI's undertakings will involve many high school and college students, as well as graduate students working towards their master-of-science or doctorate degrees. Sweeping anthropogenic changes to environmental landscapes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries pose urgent challenges to organisms and their populations. Potential organismal responses to unsuitable and disintegrating habitats are to move, perish, acclimate ecologically, or adapt evolutionarily. Predicting among these population outcomes requires long-term studies in which species, demography, physiology, ecology, and genetic variability have been monitored before as well as during a period of habitat change. The PIs will couple long-term spatial and temporal data, spanning 1976 to present, on variation in physiological processes and life-history traits with genetic markers of population health to develop a framework for integrating physiology, genetics, and demography in predicting responses of populations facing habitat degradation. Furthermore they will couple measures of individual state variables (physiological plasticity, genotype, and fitness measures) to link individual-level states and heterogeneity among individuals to population-level demography. They will accomplish these goals of measuring longterm heath indices by mining or longterm tissue and DNA collections on replicate populations of garter snakes inhabiting the northeastern Sierra Nevada mountain range. To accomplish the synthetic goals, mathematical models with structural equation modeling and additional modeling approaches will be developed and utilized. This will result in a fully-linked model of the relationships among physiological and genetic variation, organismal life-history variation, and environmental variation.